Many of the container closures at the present time are of the tamper evident type. This type of cap or closure usually provides a retaining ring that is intermittently attached to a main cap body by frangible sections of plastic that tear away when the cap is unscrewed. U.S. Pat. No. 7,228,979 issued to Long, Jr, on Jun. 12, 2007 shows this type of closure having a retaining ring 34 and cap body 32 with break-away stubs.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,474,491 issued to Benoit-Gonin et al. on Nov. 5, 2002 also shows this type of tamper evident closure. This closure goes on to show that once the cap is unscrewed it stays attached to the bottle by means of two arms of material that form a circle with film hinges that do not break upon opening of the container. This closure shows that a force is imparted from the cap to the bottle through a rigid stay that causes the cap to be held back away from the bottle mouth opening in a fixed position. This closure provides a fixed open position but the cap may interfere with the user's mouth and nose as the cap maintains a fixed position that is at a higher plane than that of the bottle or container mouth opening. When used on a pouring type vessel such as a motor oil bottle, this type of closure may interrupt the flow of the dispensing fluid for the same reason. U.S. Pat. No. 5,215,204 issued to Beck et al. on Jun. 1, 1993 shows a similar type closure having a tethering member that allows the cap to remain attached to the bottle after opening as well. This tethering method allows for the cap to loosely dangle and may get in the way of the user when drinking from the bottle. A similar approach is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,805,792 to Lecinski et al. having a further drawback in that the neck of the container must be increased to accommodate the elongated tether. The attendant tooling costs for neck redesign represents a large deterrent in a cost sensitive packaging sector. These prior art closures provide tethering but the caps interfere with the function of the bottle during use and necessitate undesirable and costly tooling changes to the closure/filler neck envelope.